Trying to determine the future of online advertising
June 12, 2008 by Colleen Coplick
Filed under Social Media
Online advertising, and the model that works best these days, is a topic that’s been on my mind a lot lately.
If you’ve got the budget to run a comprehensive campaign (which includes strong brand consistency and lots of repetition), advertising can work for you, as part of your overall marketing strategy.
Mitch Joel pointed me to a great article in The Economist about behavioural targeting, and what that means for both consumers and advertisers.
Attempts to sneak in behavioural-targeting systems through the back door could give a promising idea a bad name. Done properly, behavioural targeting promises to make advertising more relevant for consumers, to increase conversion rates for advertisers and to make online publishers’ advertising slots more valuable (since even slots on obscure web pages can have relevant ads placed in them). [source]
While, in theory, it sounds great that any advertising targeted to me would be more relevant, what if I don’t want to be advertised at? Would you pay to avoid dealing with advertising? And if you are willing to pay, how much would you consider appropriate?
one option is of course the plugins and tools that block most if not all ads served via any method other than hard coding… that said, I would imagine that a pro (and pay per use) version of such things will appear in the not too distant future with a set of other features much the way Tivo did. And I think it will gain subscribers if done right. It will obviously have to have some other benefit than just ad reduction in content since it’s been shown that users (at this time at least) generally prefer to ignore ads rather than pay or work (installing a plugin) to block/remove/skip them. Tivo got somewhere by allowing timeshifting as much as if not more than by allowing ad skipping. I think that any online tool/service would need to include such a feature set. I also think that the premium content model could work if the content is of high enough quality and the ads disruptive enough—iTunes TV store is a good example of this I think—but again the other features are probably tipping if not decisive.